Hill fumes as Pentagon describes vast China balloon spy program

China has been conducting balloon surveillance for years and monitored dozens of countries, the Biden administration said, on a day when its handling of the balloon that traversed the country last week came under sharp bipartisan criticism on Capitol Hill.

The Chinese government has flown its fleet of spy balloons “over more than 40 countries across five continents,” said a senior State Department official who detailed a far more extensive monitoring program than U.S. officials had acknowledged before.

The official said Thursday that U.S. agencies determined that the balloons were “clearly for intelligence surveillance” and not on civilian missions to collect weather data as Chinese officials claim. The balloon shot down by a U.S. fighter jet last week was first noticed flying over Montana, which is home to Malmstrom Air Force Base and one of the military’s three nuclear missile silo fields.

The revelations did nothing to cool anger on Capitol Hill toward China or ease bipartisan concerns about the Biden administration’s handling of the incident. Chinese officials insisted again that the Biden administration was overreacting to the incident and confirmed Pentagon accounts that they refused to take a call from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin this week to discuss the downing of what they called an “unmanned civilian airship.”

Bipartisan frustrations on Capitol Hill appeared to reach a tipping point.

The House, on a 419-0, vote passed a resolution introduced by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, Texas Republican, that condemned China for what lawmakers called a “brazen violation of United States sovereignty” and denounced the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to deceive the global community with disinformation.

Rep. Thomas Tiffany, Wisconsin Republican, said the resolution is meant to send a message to the national security and intelligence communities to strengthen their scrutiny of China.

“Are they paying attention to our chief adversary and what they’re up to?” Mr. Tiffany said. “While [the resolution] is symbolic, I think it’s a good first message to them to let them know that we are concerned about their performance.”

Fifteen lawmakers, including Rep. Eric Swalwell, California Democrat, did not vote on the resolution. His absence raised eyebrows because of past stories linking him to a prominent female Chinese spy. He has denied any wrongdoing in his relationship in 2019 with the suspected spy, named Fang Fang.

On the other side of the Capitol, senators faced off with administration officials in an all-hands classified briefing on the incursion and the decision to shoot it down Saturday off the coast of South Carolina.

Lawmakers went into the closed-door talks demanding answers as to why the administration chose not to shoot down the spy craft immediately after it was detected in U.S. airspace and whether the Pentagon has a plan to deal with any further incursions.

“This administration owes Americans not only on what happened this past week but on what steps they’re going to take to ensure this never happens again,” Sen. Jon Tester, Montana Democrat, told Pentagon officials in an open hearing ahead of the classified briefing, signaling the widespread frustration among his colleagues.

“The truth is, we think we know what [the Chinese] are going to collect, but we don’t know,” said Mr. Tester, who chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees defense spending. “That scares the hell out of me.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre again tried to defend Mr. Biden’s handling of the incident during a back-and-forth with reporters on Air Force One.

“We were able to protect any national security, sensitive information that was on the ground as it was moving on its path,” she said. When the Pentagon felt it was safe, she added, “the president ordered to shoot it down.”

Several senators said they remained frustrated after the closed-door briefing.

“I’m not persuaded,” said Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the top Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, when asked whether Mr. Biden made the right call in allowing the Chinese craft to travel for five days over the U.S. mainland before ordering the military to shoot it down.

Mr. Rubio said he doesn’t dismiss the Pentagon’s concerns about the threat to those on the ground from a shoot-down but added that the administration had ample time to act before the helium-filled craft entered U.S. airspace.

Collecting intelligence

The senior State Department official who briefed reporters on background said imagery from American U-2 spy plane “flybys revealed that the high-altitude balloon was capable of conducting signals intelligence collection operations.”

“The high-altitude balloon’s equipment was clearly for intelligence surveillance and [was] inconsistent with the equipment on board weather balloons,” the official said. “It had multiple antennas, [including] an array likely capable of collecting and geolocating communications.

“It was equipped with solar panels large enough to produce the requisite power to operate multiple active intelligence collection sensors,” the official said.

U.S. Navy divers have pulled up pieces of the downed craft off the South Carolina coast, and experts are examining the equipment to try to understand their functions and sources, U.S. officials said.

“We are confident that the balloon manufacturer has a direct relationship with China’s military and is an approved vendor of the [People’s Liberation Army],” the State Department official said.

The department said in a statement that it was exploring “action against [Chinese] entities linked to the [People’s Liberation Army] that supported the balloon’s incursion into U.S. airspace. We will also look at broader efforts to expose and address [China’s] larger surveillance activities that pose a threat to our national security, and to our allies and partners.”

U.S. officials first became aware of the balloon on Jan. 28 when it was spotted over Alaska before entering Canadian airspace. The president was briefed days before the balloon returned to U.S. skies over northern Idaho on Jan. 31, according to the White House.

A win for China?

Mr. Rubio said the administration’s hesitation gave Beijing a propaganda victory.

“You can imagine them going to the world and saying, ‘We can fly a balloon over the continental United States and nothing happens. What makes you think the U.S. is going to be able to come to help you if they come after you?’

“It’s a powerful message to send because, generally, the Communist Party of China believes the U.S. is a hollowed, declining superpower,” he said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Republican, blasted the administration for not treating the balloon’s initial penetration of her home state’s airspace as a serious threat.

“When it comes to national security and national defense, no state should feel like they are more vulnerable than the rest,” she said. “I think we need to recognize that the airspace over the state of Alaska, over our territorial waters, is U.S. airspace. And so if it’s appropriate to take it down off of the East Coast in U.S. airspace, it is also equally appropriate to take it down off the coast of Alaska.”

Biden administration officials kept quiet for nearly a week after the spy balloon first entered U.S. airspace. They feared the matter would complicate Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing, according to a Bloomberg report. The administration was forced to go public on Feb. 2 after the Billings Gazette published a photo of the balloon over Montana, where the U.S. Air Force has a base housing nuclear weapons.

Mr. Blinken’s planned fence-mending visit to Beijing was postponed indefinitely.

The Biden administration got some support for its approach to the crisis. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, New Jersey Democrat, said after the briefing that the administration “acted correctly” given the totality of the factors it had to consider.

He said the administration sent a “very resolute message” by halting Mr. Blinken’s visit to China but the episode exposed a “domain awareness gap” on the part of the Pentagon that needs to be closed. He said the incursion also raised the stakes for U.S.-Chinese relations.

“We have to be able to understand everything that may be coming towards our country in every dimension …,” he said. “What do we now do with [Chinese President] Xi Jinping in terms of making him understand that there are consequences for this action?”

Sen. John Kennedy, Louisiana Republican, said he was not convinced that the administration would have disclosed the balloon if it had not been reported in the press, raising further questions about the administration’s transparency.

“The administration says it’s OK to leave it there for a while because the balloon is not relaying information back to China,” Mr. Kennedy told reporters after the briefing. “We don’t have any basis for believing or not believing that. I’m not saying the president is lying, but he needs to explain what he is asserting is actually the case.

“Based on what I was told today and the evasive answers,” he said, “I wouldn’t trust these people to guard my lunch.”

• Mica Soellner contributed to this report, which is based in part on wire service reports.